Reduplication in Rotuman

This thesis is the first comprehensive investigation of reduplication in Rotuman, an Oceanic language. It includes a rigorous description of Rotuman reduplication based on a corpus of 2600 stems extracted from Churchward’s (1940) Dictionary and a thorough analysis within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) of all reduplicant shapes. This analysis draws on generalized templates and minimal word phonology to demonstrate that the productive form of foot reduplication is shaped by well-formedness constraints associated with the minimal word in Rotuman. By building an analysis around the prosodic structure of phase, a morphological process particular to Rotuman, this thesis captures the intuitions of previous scholars on the relationship between these two processes. All divergences from the minimal word phonology of the reduplicant and incomplete phase prosody are accounted for using standard constraintbased accounts of anti-gemination, under-application, and prosodic faithfulness.